


pick it up, pick it all up (start again)

by nolightss



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Depression, Disabled Character, Hospitals, M/M, POV Second Person, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 01:41:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2563583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolightss/pseuds/nolightss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're afraid of what parts of this you’ll regret without six different drugs pumping through your veins so you curl around his hand, curl around his light because it’s brighter than anything you’ve ever felt in years.</p>
<p>Jack attempts suicide and meets Crutchie in the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pick it up, pick it all up (start again)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Medicine by Daughter
> 
> Full trigger warning list at end notes!

You awoke to a steady beeping, to tubes in your nose and your stomach and you felt like you were floating, if just for a second, floating on stark white sheets until you drop into reality again, cold and grey and grasping you tighter and tighter by the second. The realization of where you are hits you, a train colliding with your fragile body, weighed down with every hazy thought crammed into your doped up brain.

 

Curtains, a bed, sheets pulled up to your chest, a plant across the room. Your eyes search for something to focus on, something with life in it but your search runs dry, leaves you feeling emptier than you already did. Your throat still burns, traces of bleach clawing their way up your esophagus and out through your mouth, coughed up onto the clean, clean sheets.

 

You let your head drop back onto the pillow, and make every attempt to not think of the way your brain seems to lag, seems to fall behind and you know your body should feel something other than numb but the painkillers seem to be holding tight so you let them, let them drag you back to sleep, until a voice yanks you from your cloudy thoughts.

 

“You’re awake!”

 

The voice seems too cheery for a hospital ward, and for a moment you’re not sure if it’s your medicated brain spinning sounds in your mind but you lift your head anyway, some part of you glad for some kind of visitor.

 

The boy is smaller than you, though seems similar in age, with freckles splattered across a face beaming brighter than the hospital floors. He’s leaning on a crutch, his right leg dragging on the floor behind him, and he’s got various cuts and scrapes across his face and hands, at odds with his otherwise bright disposition.

 

You sit up, ignoring the sloshing feeling in your stomach, and nod at the kid, unsure of what to say. He smiles at you, and settles himself into the chair so obviously vacant next to the bed.

 

“It’s gettin’ boring round here, with only me. I’m glad you’re awake now. What’s your name?”

 

You sigh. You know he can see the clipboard at the end of your bed, and you know he’s just making conversation, but you don’t know if you want to answer any further or go back to sleep.

 

_Screw it,_ you decide, and the clouds in your head pull apart for one moment when you look the kid in the eye and answer. “Jack. You?”

 

“People call me Crutchie, always have,” he tells you, as though it’s just a fact of life, something everyone’s dealt with.

 

There’s something reassuring about his already ever-present optimism, even if you can’t mimic it yourself.

 

“Did your folks come to visit?” he asks casually, although you can detect something else in his tone, just barely there and carefully concealed, and you’re too tired to make something of it, distracted by the question you’re so tired of hearing.

 

“No. I don’t got any folks,” And with the first syllable the bitterness is creeping back into your tone, familiar and almost comfortable. Crutchie casts his eyes down for a second before replying.

 

“Me neither. Friends, though, I got some of those, yeah?”

 

You give him a look, somewhere between pity and resignation and he laughs, rising to leave.

 

“You should sleep some more. I’ll see you later!”

 

And with that, he’s gone, and you let the drugs drag you under again, wondering why the kid cares so much anyway.

 

-

 

You spend the next two days sleeping and staring out the window across the room, watching the grey summer clouds inch across the volatile sky, trying to think as little as possible about anything at all, trying to keep your brain quiet for once, trying not to let every doubt creep up and grab you again.

 

They’ve taken the tubes out of your stomach now, and while it still burns sometimes, it doesn’t feel as awful as it did. You figure you could wander around the ward now, find Crutchie, find something to do but you can’t bring yourself to even stand, let alone walk down the hall to see him.

 

The nurse comes in every few hours, gives you a soft look, checks your machines, and you’ve stopped noticing her, let her blend with the blue-white curtains and linoleum floors.

 

Crutchie finds you toward the end of the second day, and takes the seat next to your bed, waiting for you to acknowledge him. It takes you a minute, takes you a minute to untangle from the oxygen tube and roll toward him and when you do, his face is so calm, so gentle, that it takes you by surprise. It’s been longer than you’d like to admit since since someone looked at you like that, anyone.

 

“You okay?” He asks, leaning forward as he speaks, his hand moving to the mattress, inches from your own.

 

_No, nothing is okay,_ you think, _I’ve got fourteen ounces of bleach running through my system and I wish there was more, I wish it would just hurry up and get me out of this place cause I don’t think I can take it any longer, I don’t think I can mess up any more times and I’m afraid to leave this bed because I’m afraid of what I might do to myself but it’s starting to look more and more tempting every day_ , and you don’t realize your thoughts have seeped out your mouth until Crutchie’s hand is a vice grip on yours, his other hand reaching for your face and you want to pull away, want him to leave because you can’t mess up with anyone else, can’t drag anyone else into your trainwreck of a life.

 

You let him touch you, though, let his hand stay on yours and you’re afraid, afraid of what will happen if he leaves, afraid of what parts of this you’ll regret without six different drugs pumping through your veins so you curl around his hand, curl around his light because it’s brighter than anything you’ve ever felt in years, hoping maybe some of it can seep into you too.

 

-

 

You awake to a steady beeping, and to Crutchie, head pillowed in your lap and hand still held tight to yours. His dark hair contrasts wildly with the sheets and your gown and your hands, pale and grey, scars bulging like some grotesque, paper-white claw marks across your wrists and you feel like you’re ruining the image. The perfect balance of his hand against the sheets seems tainted by your own, sickly hand, fingers desperately clinging to his.

 

He wakes, soon after you’ve resigned yourself to watching his slowly rising and falling form, and faces you, soft eyes searching the room before settling on your face.

 

“Morning,” he says, a yawn creeping into his voice and you feel bad, feel bad for having this, for having him there, thrown before you so perfectly and with such perfect light, and you feel like you’re ruining him, feel like you’re only bringing him down.

 

“How’d you get in here all night?” you ask, anything to keep the conversation away from yourself, afraid you’ll spill everything else you’re carrying onto him.

 

He laughs and stretches, moving to leave as he answers.

“I think the nurses like me. I’m here quite a bit.”

 

You want to ask, to know anything about this kid, but he speaks again before you can get a word in.

 

“I-uh, I’m going in for surgery tomorrow. You probably won’t see me for a bit. Thought I should let you know.” He shrugs a little, adjusts the crutch under his arm and forces a smile.

 

“Oh! Okay. Good luck, then,” you tell him, and the question is on the tip of your tongue, but you swallow it, let it settle with the chemicals in your stomach.

 

He smiles again, this time warmly and knowingly, and you wish you could keep it, hold onto it in your pocket for the rest of your life.

 

-

 

The next day and a half you spend counting the birds that fly by out the window, and avoiding going into the bathroom as much as possible. It’s as sickeningly clean as the rest of the hospital, and the faint smell of bleach and cleaning supplies is enough to make you want to vomit. Your bed is warmer, and the sheets have gotten softer, and they’ve begun to wean you off the drugs you’ve been under. Everything seems less hazy now, more in focus and while you know you probably shouldn’t have, you’ve missed the depressive numbness you’ve gotten so used to. It’s the old paint, showing under the new, comfortable and familiar and you just can’t bring yourself to cover it up.

 

The evening of day two comes, and you’re out of bed, bare feet on the cold floors sending a jolt through your spine. You figure Crutchie’s room isn’t too far from yours, and you’ve begun to get a familiar sense of worry, creeping in under the numbness in your head.

 

You find him, two doors down, sitting up in bed. You knock on the doorframe, and he faces you, surprised.

 

“Hey, Jack. How’s it hangin’?”

 

He sounds tired, sounds older than he ever has, even in your short time knowing him. You sit on the bed next to him, and realize he’s worse than you’ve ever seen him.

 

The bags under his eyes are prominent, a sad compliment to the starry freckles all over his face. His cuts and bruises, once covered by band-aids and such are uncovered, out for the world to see and it hurts you, really, too look at his face, his smile a little more crooked than it was. He looks at you, and then drops his gaze, and you follow it, and see. The leg that was dragging behind him is gone, empty space from above the knee onward, what remains wrapped in gauze, the white blending in with the sheets.

 

“Crutchie-” you start, and cut yourself off, not knowing what to say, your hands in front of you, not knowing what to touch or do and he laughs, a soft little thing.

 

“I’m okay. I’ll be okay,” he tells you, and his voice cracks on the last syllable, the sort of crack that comes from months of bottling it up, and you know the feeling, know what it’s like to tell yourself and everyone else that you’re fine, when you’re really bubbling to a breaking point on the inside.

 

You hug him, then, initiating the contact you were so afraid of making, gather him in your arms and he’s shaking, crying against your shoulder and you can’t do anything but rub his back, bury your hand in his hair and hush softly against his head.

 

He pulls back and swallows, wipes his eyes on his gown and speaks, fidgeting with the blankets as he does so.

 

“My leg. It was bad when I was born, so I’ve always been Crutchie. It was fine, I was used to it, y’know? But last month, a car hit my mom’s. Messed me up even worse. The rest of me was okay, except my leg. My mom- she-” and he breaks again, his perfect light, dripping down his cheeks in drops of silver and you hold him again, you lie next to him and hold him, sink into the stiff sheets and hold his hands, suddenly unafraid of the scars on your own.

 

He drifts off to sleep soon after, the painkillers kicking in and you find your hand against his cheek and your lips on his forehead, ghostly pale against his soft glow, even red from the tears, he’s softer than anything in the whole damn hospital, and gentler than the medicine running through either of your veins.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for attempted suicide, depression, suicidal ideation, hospitalization, injury and there's a mention of a car accident.
> 
> Also posted on my tumblr [here](http://crutchies.tumblr.com/post/101720634588)


End file.
